Realization

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  It dawned on me (or rather sunset on me, for this recognition felt old, familiar, auburn) that Rachel loved me or would have had she met me at some more favorable moment in her life or mine, or had I been even a few years older. All these objections, and her proud fear of exposing her love to someone who might not welcome it, made her break off, sigh, fidget with her hair, strum the Duino Elegies and squint into already feeble sunlight further filtered by drawn curtains. That distant, scarcely audible whistle must belong to a coach on the playing fields half a mile away. Her chair creaked. Tim materialized, rubbing sleep and fever out of his eyes. He’d been kept home today with the flu. Without hesitation he climbed up onto my lap and butted his head dully, stubbornly against my chest, frustrated because he was sick. I sipped the hot coffee and smiled inwardly at the thought of this wife and this son I’d acquired, these phantom dependents. Sometimes I caught DeQuincey sneaking an unpleasant glance at me, but I knew he would never exile me or even antagonize me, for he needed me to placate his implacable wife. Once, only once, on a Saturday night we three drank two bottles of wine and we let the talk drift to sex. “Yeah,” DeQuincey said, “Rachel’s got her fantasies. She’d like—” “Shut up,” Rachel said without any particular emphasis. An incongruous smile flickered over her features. “Just shut up.” The smile suggested she was anticipating his next move, as a sitter lights up the moment before he is finally shown his portrait. “Yeah, Rachel wants two pricks, one in each hand.” I drew back inwardly at the terrible words and the smile that was leaking out of DeQuincey’s face like candlelight from a carved pumpkin. He had just given a haywire emphasis to the words two pricks that made me no longer think of him as a lovable, befuddled, overgrown preppy but rather as a man who had really had real mental breakdowns, whose imagination had festered. I looked for a reflection of my disgust in Rachel’s face, but she was grinning and staring at her accomplice, perhaps her impresario. There was an air about them of driven but thoroughly professional gamblers. He had just placed a roll of chips on a number. She more than matched him and pushed forward with both her small hands, slowly but firmly, all her remaining wealth. “Okay,” she said softly. Her terrible silent chuckle had begun. She spread her legs under the full skirt, planted her elbows on her knees and looked up at us. Her gaze was steady and provocative, although from time to time she had to steal a glance at the cue card to break the tension.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Unfortunately, if the original structures of oppression are not dismantled, those who are oppressed can easily become oppressors. Sarah, the property of her husband, obtained her own property in the form of Hagar, a resident alien. Sarah's inability to bear Abraham children led her to conclude that her barrenness was a curse by God, and so she took matters into her own hands. In keeping with the customs of her time, she offered her servant, a slave girl, as an instrument by which Abraham could sire an heir. Hagar, as womb, not person, was used to accomplish the goals of those who owned her body. Her body and labor existed to be exploited by those who had power over her. If a woman does not have control over her sexual organs and is forced to have sexual relationships with a man against her will, for whatever reason, the result is called rape. Hagar, as a slave, as property, was required to “perform” at the will of her owners, a familiar scenario for many black female slaves who, as possessions, had to satisfy their master's desires as well as face the dehumanizing practice of being “rented out” to other white men as concubines. As the story proceeds, the unexpected happened. Sarah's property, a surrogate mother, experienced consciousness raising and recognized her own dignity. Hagar became the first woman in the Bible to seek her own liberation, by fleeing Sarah's cruelty (as well as sexual rivalry between barrenness and fertility). She thus chose death in the desert, if necessary, to challenge the power structures that oppressed her, even though she was pregnant by Abraham. While in the wilderness, Hagar was visited by a messenger of God, a God who accompanied the outcast in the midst of her unwarranted suffering. Yet the divine message for Hagar was to return to Sarah and “suffer affliction under her hand.” Why would God require her to return to slavery? Perhaps it was crucial for the survival of her unborn son, who would then be born in the house of Abraham an heir to the promise of God. But is this liberation or a strategy for survival? Regardless, her child becomes an intruder to the covenant. It is to be noted that, breaking with biblical tradition, God's promise was made to a woman, with no reference to a man. At this point, Hagar, the lowly marginalized woman, does the unexpected: she dares to give God a name, a privilege extended to no other person throughout the Bible. Ancient custom dictated that only a superior could name those who are lower in status, yet here a slave woman is the first biblically recorded person to give God a name. She calls God El Roi , the God who sees, uniting the divine with her human experience of suffering. The second time the Bible returns to Hagar, she has been cast out by those who own her. Sarah's jealousy got the better of her.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Matthew’s story of Joseph in fact underlines the connection between genealogy and birth narrative. It links, as we will see, the last woman of the genealogy to the first, Mary to Tamar … and Joseph to Judah. It is usual y said that in the birth narrative Mary is marginalized; Joseph becomes the main actor. 44 But to read the birth narrative in light of the genealogy is to discover a different portrayal of Joseph. The story of Joseph in Matthew is told as a story of righteousness, and a woman improperly pregnant. This is the question at the center of the story of Judah and Tamar, too. Consider the parallels. 1. Judah discovers that the woman belonging to him is pregnant, and not by her lawful husband (for she does not have one anymore). Joseph discovers that the woman belonging to him is pregnant, and not by her lawful husband (for she does not have one yet). 2. Joseph, being righteous, seeks to fulfil the law; he decides (being also merciful) to put off Mary privately. Judah seeks to fulfil the law; he declares that Tamar shall be burnt. 3. Tamar sends to Judah the sign that the child is hers by him. The angel gives to Joseph the sign that the child is Mary’s by the Holy Spirit. 4. Judah at the beginning of David’s line and Joseph at its end act righteously to put off the woman who bears the child that is not theirs. In their righteousness, unwittingly, they endanger the Davidic line and the whole thrust of the covenant promises/biblical history. 5. Tamar by her own word, and Mary by the angel’s word are saved. 6. As at the end of Judah’s story Judah does not have sexual relations with Tamar because the sons are born, so at the end of the birth narrative Joseph does not have sexual relations with Mary until the son is born.45 Mary’s pregnancy and Joseph’s dangerous righteousness thus bring us full circle, to the first woman named in the genealogy. Mary is linked to Tamar, Judah to Joseph; the last son of David to the ancestor on whom the promise of a royal scepter rests. This is all one story, as Matthew tel s it, and it is a story in both instances of the word of God coming to fruition not in the man—not even in his righteousness—but in the woman. “She has been found more righteous than I,” Judah says. And Joseph discovers that his righteousness was blind.46 The word that God is speaking—in which, Matthew’s gospel 43 Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1.198. 44 Anderson is representative: “In these episodes Joseph, rather than Mary, is the focus of attention … Mary is marginalized” (“Mary’s Difference,” 189–90). 45 For this last parallel see T. P. Osborne, “Les femmes de la généalogie de Jésus dans l’évangile de Matthieu et l’application de la Torah,” RTL 41.2 (2010): 243–58, esp. 251 n. 14.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Dick did not know a thing of the whole mess. He thought I was her father. He thought she had run away from an upperclass home just to wash dishes in a diner. He believed anything. Why should I want to make things harder than they were by raking up all that muck? But, I said, she must be sensible, she must be a sensible girl (with her bare drum under that thin brown stuff), she must understand that if she expected the help I had come to give, I must have at least a clear comprehension of the situation. “Come, his name!” She thought I had guessed long ago. It was (with a mischievous and melancholy smile) such a sensational name. I would never believe it. She could hardly believe it herself. His name, my fall nymph. It was so unimportant, she said. She suggested I skip it. Would I like a cigarette? No. His name. She shook her head with great resolution. She guessed it was too late to raise hell and I would never believe the unbelievably unbelievable— I said I had better go, regards, nice to have seen her. She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the other hand, after all—“Do you really want to know who it was? Well, it was—” And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago. Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of rendering—she was talking but I sat melting in my golden peace—of rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now. She was, as I say, talking. It now came in a relaxed flow. He was the only man she had ever been crazy about. What about Dick? Oh, Dick was a lamb, they were quite happy together, but she meant something different. And I had never counted, of course? She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible—and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary—fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Whereupon he to me: “If Castor and Pollux were in company of that mirror, which purveys of his light upward and downward,7 thou wouldst see the glowing Zodiac revolve yet closer to the Bears, unless it strayed from its ancient path. If thou wouldst have power to conceive how that may be, rapt within thyself, imagine Zion and this mount to be placed on the earth so that both have one sole horizon and different hemispheres; wherefore the way, which, to his hurt, Phaëton knew not how to drive,8 thou shalt see must needs pass this on the one side when it passes Zion on the other, if thy mind right clearly apprehends.” “Of a surety, Master mine,” said I, “never saw I so clearly as I discern, there where my wit seemed at fault, that the median circle of the heavenly motion, which is called Equator in one of the sciences, and which ever remains ’twixt the sun and winter,” for the reason that thou tellest, departs here towards the North, as far as the Hebrews used to see it towards the hot climes.9 But if it please thee, willingly would I know how far we have to go, for the hillside rises higher than mine eyes can reach.” And he to me: “This mountain is such, that ever at the beginning below ’tis toilsome, and the more a man ascends the less it wearies. Therefore when it shall seem to thee so pleasant that the ascending becomes to thee easy, even as in a boat to descend with the stream, then shalt thou be at the end of this path: there hope to rest thy weariness. No more I answer, and this I know for truth.” And when he had said his word, a voice10 hard by sounded: “Perchance ere that thou wilt have need to sit.” At sound of it each of us turned him round, and we saw on the left a great mass of stone, which neither I nor he perceived before. Thither drew we on; and there were persons, lounging in the shade behind the rock, even as a man settles him to rest for laziness. And one of them, who seemed to me weary, was sitting and clasping his knees, holding his face low down between them. “O sweet my Lord,” said I, “set thine eye on that one who shows himself lazier than if Sloth were his very sister.” Then turned he to us and gave heed, moving his face only over his thigh, and said: “Now go thou up who art valiant.” Then knew I who he was, and that toil which still oppressed a little my breath, did not hinder my going to him; and after I had got to him, his head he scarce did lift, saying: “Hast thou truly seen how the sun drives his chariot on thy leftside?”

• From Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

  Thus it seems likely that if the Christian churches had remained democratic and self-governing organizations, the spirit of Christian democracy would have been perpetuated, intensified, and practically trained among them, and would have turned with greater vigor and efficiency to all moral and social tasks lying about the Church. It is significant that with every turn toward a purer conception of worship and doctrine in the evangelical sects of the Middle Ages, there was also a turn toward democracy in church organization and toward radical social ideas. They all had communistic ideals. The lack of scientific Comprehension of social development To undertake the gradual reconstruction of social life consciously and intelligently would have required a scientific comprehension of social life which was totally lacking in the past. Sociology is still an infant science. Modern political economy may be said to have begun with Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” which was published in 1776. Modern historical science, which is interpreting the origins and the development of social institutions, is only about a century old. For the ordinary man the social order as he finds it has all the sanctity and immutability of natural and divine law. Under feudalism both noble and peasant assumed that God himself had divided humanity into barons and serfs, and any contradiction of that seemed a sacrilege to the barons and a joyful surprise to the serfs. In monarchical countries the institution of kingship is regarded as the natural and divine order. In European thought it is treated as an axiom that there must be well-defined social classes. In our own country intelligent men assume that land has always been freely bought and sold by individuals as to-day; that a man has always had the power to dispose about his property even after he was dead; that business men have always bought in the cheapest market and sold in the dearest at whatever prices they could make; that workingmen have always competed with one another for wages; and that any attempt to change these social adjustments is an attempt to meddle with a natural law as universal as the law of gravitation. Yet our capitalistic organization is of comparatively recent origin, and would have been thought intolerable and immoral in times past. We are only now coming to realize that within certain limits human society is plastic, constantly changing its forms, and that the present system of social organization, as it superseded others, may itself be displaced by something better. Without such a conception of the evolution of social institutions any larger idea of social regeneration could hardly enter the minds of men. The modern socialist movement is really the first intelligent, concerted, and continuous effort to reshape society in accordance with the laws of social development. The comprehension of the gradualness of social changes is also a late attainment. The childish mind wants swift results and loses interest if things move slowly.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Provided with Quilty’s name, Humbert now makes his way to Pavor Manor, that latter-day House of Usher on Grimm Road, where the extended and variegated parodies of Poe are laid to rest. All the novel’s parodic themes are concluded in this chapter. Its importance is telescoped by Humbert’s conclusion: “This, I said to myself, was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty.” In form, of course, this bravura set piece is not a play; but, as a summary parodic commentary on the main action, it does function in the manner of an Elizabethan play-within-the-play, and its “staging” underscores once more the game-element central to the book. Simultaneous with these games is a fully novelistic process that shows Humbert traveling much further than the 27,000 miles he and Lolita literally traverse. Foolish John Ray describes Humbert’s as “a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis” and, amazingly enough, he turns out to be right. The reader sees Humbert move beyond his obsessional passion to a not altogether straightforward declaration of genuine love (here) and, finally, to a realization of the loss suffered not by him but by Lolita (here). It is expressed on the next to the last page in a long and eloquent passage that, for the first time in the novel, is in no way undercut by parody or qualified by irony. Midway through this “last mirage of wonder and hopelessness,” the reader is invoked again, because Humbert’s moral apotheosis, so uniquely straightforward, constitutes the end game and Nabokov’s final trompe-l’oeil. If the reader has long since decided that there is no “moral reality” in the novel, and in his sophisticated way has accepted that, he may well miss this unexpected move in the farthest corner of the board and lose the game after all. It is the last time the reader will be addressed directly, for the game is about over, as is the novel. In addition to sustaining the game-element, the authorial patterning reminds us that Lolita is but one part of that universe of fiction arrayed around the consciousness of Nabokov, who would join Humbert in his lament that words do indeed have their limitations, and that “the past is the past”; to live in it, as Humbert tried, is to die. That the author of Speak, Memory should suggest this surely establishes the moral dimension of Lolita; and in the light of Johan Huizinga’s remark that “play is outside the range of good and bad,”32 Lolita becomes an even more extraordinary achievement.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It wasn’t until I was settled, facing a nice little family group—mother, daddy, baby—that it dawned on me how funny that episode had been. My zipless fuck! My stranger on a train! Here I’d been offered my very own fantasy. The fantasy that had riveted me to the vibrating seat of the train for three years in Heidelberg and instead of turning me on, it had revolted me! Puzzling, wasn’t it? A tribute to the mysteriousness of the psyche. Or maybe my psyche had begun to change in a way I hadn’t anticipated. There was no longer anything romantic about strangers on trains. Perhaps there was no longer anything romantic about men at all? The trip to London proved purgatorial. First, there were my companions in the compartment: a stuffy American professor, his dowdy wife, and their drooly baby. The husband led off with the interrogation. Was I married? What answer could I make to that? I didn’t really know anymore. It might have been an easy enough situation for a more taciturn person, but I am one of those morons who feels compelled to spill the story of her life to any passerby who asks. It took all my will power to say quite simply: “No!” “Why isn’t a nice girl like you married?” I smiled. Isadora Sphinx. Should I begin a little tirade about marriage and the oppression of women? Should I plead for sympathy, saying my lover dumped me? Should I make a brave front of it and say my husband drowned in jargon in Vienna? Should I hint at lesbian mysteries beyond their ken? “I don’t know,” I said, smiling hard enough to crack my face. Change the subject fast, I thought, before I tell them. If there’s one thing I’m not good at, it’s self-concealment. “Where are you headed for?” I asked brightly. They were off to London for a vacation. The husband talked and the wife fed the baby. The husband issued policy statements and the wife kept her mouth shut. “Why isn’t a nice girl like you single?” I thought. Oh shut up Isadora, don’t meddle…. The train wheels seemed to be saying: shut up…shut up…shut up…. The husband was a chemistry professor. He was teaching on a Fulbright at Toulouse. He really liked the French system. “Discipline,” he said. We needed more of it in America—didn’t I agree? “Not really,” I said. He looked vexed. Actually, I informed him, I’d taught in college myself. “Really?” This gave me new status. I might be a curious lone female, but at least I was not a bottle-washer like his wife. “Don’t you agree that our American educational system has misconstrued the meaning of democracy?” he asked, all pomposity and bile. “No,” I said, “I don’t agree.” Oh Isadora, you are getting crusty. When was the last time you said “I don’t agree…” and said it so calmly? I’m beginning to like me quite a lot, I thought.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In result of that weird interview, the numbness of my soul was for a moment resolved. And no wonder! I had actually seen the agent of fate. I had palpated the very flesh of fate—and its padded shoulder. A brilliant and monstrous mutation had suddenly taken place, and here was the instrument. Within the intricacies of the pattern (hurrying housewife, slippery pavement, a pest of a dog, steep grade, big car, baboon at its wheel), I could dimly distinguish my own vile contribution. Had I not been such a fool—or such an intuitive genius—to preserve that journal, fluids produced by vindictive anger and hot shame would not have blinded Charlotte in her dash to the mailbox. But even had they blinded her, still nothing might have happened, had not precise fate, that synchronizing phantom, mixed within its alembic the car and the dog and the sun and the shade and the wet and the weak and the strong and the stone. Adieu, Marlene! Fat fate’s formal handshake (as reproduced by Beale before leaving the room) brought me out of my torpor; and I wept. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury—I wept.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The diffuse look of welcome left her eyes. Her forehead puckered as in the old bitter days: “Not who?” “Where is he? Quick!” “Look,” she said, inclining her head to one side and shaking it in that position. “Look, you are not going to bring that up.” “I certainly am,” I said, and for a moment—strangely enough the only merciful, endurable one in the whole interview—we were bristling at each other as if she were still mine. A wise girl, she controlled herself. Dick did not know a thing of the whole mess. He thought I was her father. He thought she had run away from an upperclass home just to wash dishes in a diner. He believed anything. Why should I want to make things harder than they were by raking up all that muck? But, I said, she must be sensible, she must be a sensible girl (with her bare drum under that thin brown stuff), she must understand that if she expected the help I had come to give, I must have at least a clear comprehension of the situation. “Come, his name!” She thought I had guessed long ago. It was (with a mischievous and melancholy smile) such a sensational name. I would never believe it. She could hardly believe it herself. His name, my fall nymph. It was so unimportant, she said. She suggested I skip it. Would I like a cigarette? No. His name. She shook her head with great resolution. She guessed it was too late to raise hell and I would never believe the unbelievably unbelievable— I said I had better go, regards, nice to have seen her. She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the other hand, after all—“Do you really want to know who it was? Well, it was—” And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago. Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of rendering—she was talking but I sat melting in my golden peace—of rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now. She was, as I say, talking. It now came in a relaxed flow. He was the only man she had ever been crazy about.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The necessity of mastering a foreign language forced me into a new relationship to my own. (It was also in France, thcrdi:>rc, that I began to read the Bible again.) My quarrel with the English language had been that the language reflected none of my experience. But now I began to sec the matter in quite another way. If the language was not my own, it might be the fault of the lan guage; but it might also be my fault. Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to usc it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test. In support of this possibility, I had two mighty witnesses: my black ancestors, who evolved the sorrow songs, the blues and jazz, and created an entirely new idiom in an overwhelm ingly hostile place; and Shakespeare, who was the last bawdy writer in the English language. What I began to sec-espe cially since, as I say, I was living and speaking in French-is that it is experience which shapes a language; and it is lan guage which controls an experience. The structure of the French language told me something of the French experience, and also something of the French expectations-which were certainly not the American expectations, since the French daily and hourly said things which the Americans could not say at all. (Not even in French .) Similarly, the language with which I had grown up had certainly not been the King's English. An immense experience had fi:>rgcd this language, it had been (and remains) one of the tools of a people's survival , and it revealed expectations which no white American could easily entertain. The authority of this language was in its candor, its irony, its density and its beat: this was the authority of the language which produced me, and it was also the autho rity of Shakespeare.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  230 Lecture 32: Petrarch Christian dispensation; perhaps the great tension of his life was not caused by his love for Laura as much as by his efforts to blend the classical and the Christian. He was a humanist by both temperament and scholarship. But in his “Letter to Posterity”—how many have written to posterity?—he said this, and we may give him the last word: As a young man I was deluded, as an adult I went astray; but old age corrected me and experience convinced me of the truth of what I had read a long time before—that youth and pleasure are vain; or to be more exact, I was taught that by Him who creates all times and ages, and who allows wretched mortals, swollen with unjusti fi ed pride, to go astray from time to time, so that eventually they may recognize their sinfulness and see themselves as they really are. ■ Mann, Petrarch. Petrarch, Canzoniere. ———, Secret Book, Letter to Posterity, The Ascent of Mount Ventoux. 1. In what ways is humanism a useful concept in re fl ecting on Petrarch’s work and achievement? 2. What themes or concerns seem to you to run through the corpus of Petrarch’s writings? Questions to Consider Essential Reading

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I wrote the play after I finished my first novel, when I knew I had to write something, but I knew I couldn't write another novel right away. I thought I would try a play. It_�QQ�_'!\:>..Q!IJ.lb-.r.�e years to do and we produced it at Howard University. I was very casual abou-t it. I went down to Howard about a week before we were supposed to open, saw the play, and almost died. It was the first time I realized that speeches don't nec essarily work in the theater. I was suddenly bombarded with my own literature, an unbearable experience. I had to begin cutting because I realized that the actors could do many things in silence or could make one word, one gesture, count more than two or three pages of talk. I began to suspect, and this is what I'm struggling with now, that the two disci plines-tl � discipline oL.wri tio g _ _ ;Lnovel and the disci !: ! i � �� f 7 0 7 708 OTHER ESSAYS writing a play-are so extremely ditferent_Jhatit_would have been luckier for me, in terms of the play, if I ha� violinist or a guitar player or a rockc 'n '-roll singer_ .Q[_ a plumber. My chances of\vriting a play would have been better if I had been in any of those professions. Here's what I'm trying to get at when I ref er to the two disciplines. Every artist is involved with one single effort, really, which is somehow to dig dmvn to where reality is-;-We live, especially in this age and in this country and at this time, in a civilization which supposes that reality is something you can touch, that reality is tangible. The aspirations of the Amer irt_an people, as f.1r as one can read the current evidence, de pend-very heavily on this concrete, tangible, pragmatic point of view. But every artist and, in fact, every persoi1lti'i0Ws, deeper than conscious knowledge or speech can go, that.lK:- YQI_ld every reality _ _tllere is another one whic� __ _ controls it. Be- hind my writing table, which is a tangible thing, there is a passion which created the table. Behind the electric light you might be reading by now, there was the passion of a man who once stole the fire in order to bring us this light. The things that ee()ple reaJly __ <.f.Q __ and really mean and r���y_f�_c:!_�� -�I!J)QSt imposs_i_bleJQU.h�•J2 . .tQ_de.sq-jbe, �ut,_ these aTe ��<: -�<:_ry things which arc __ most_jmP,<;lrtant about them_: These things control them and that is where reality is. What one t!:LtOLtQ_QQ_in a novel is to show this reality. SL;�h etfo�t ���ild--;:;ot be important if life were not impor tant. But life_is imQQrtant, vag!rE.�( )�So tba_rL�It; but without the_passion__gf an, that portion of life we call civilization is in great danger when it begins, as we have, to neglect or to despise its artists. _fu-_tjsts arc mcQ..rlly_J2�QP.k_ul.U.Qci.t.cy_who can tell that society t):! _ t;_t!!! �h-�PQU.titsdf.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But in my play there is another church. And I suddenly saw it. I don't know if I can make this clear to you. On a back road in Mississippi or Lou isiana or some place in the deep South, we were wandering around talking to various people, and there was a small church sitting by itself. I was very oppressed that day by things we'd seen and I was very aware that I was in the deep South and had been very close to my f.1ther's birthplace. It suddenly struck me that this church must have been very much like the church in which my father preached before he came North. I looked into the window and suddenly saw my set. It was a country church. I saw that if I could select the details which would be most meaningful for what I was trying to do, then in a sense, that part of my problem was solved. And I saw something else. I always have some idea of where I want to go. I even sometimes have my last chapter or my last line, a kind ofvery rough and untrustworthy map. But I don't know quite how I'm going to get there. In the working out of a novel, you work it out in terms of dialog and conflicts, and again, this is power of suggestion, this is hitting on the WORDS OF A NATIVE SON 7 11 readers' nerves-nerves which we all have in common. In a play, you're doing the same thing . But you're doing it in such a different way that, for example, a white woman in my play, who is a somewhat older woman, married to a murderer, which is part of what the play is about, has to be revealed in very different ways. And I began to sec her by watching cer tain people, by watching for her, watching for my character, which is what you start doing, really, once this character has captured your attention. You look at everybody around you in another way. You suddenly arc looking for some revelatory and liberating detail. And if you're working on a play-1 don't know if I'm making this clear-you suddenly watch people in a very physical way. You watch the way they light their ciga rettes, you watch the way they cross a room, you observe, for the first time, whether or not this person is bowlegged and you begin to think that you can tell by the way a person combs his or her hair, by the beat of a pause, by the things they do or do not say, what is going on inside them. You're watching for the ways in which people reveal themselves in their day to-day life. What Freud callcd-1 think I'm right about this the psychopathology of everyday life. So that as I began watching for my woman in the South, I began to sec her, too.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But education can never be aimless, and it cannot occur in a vacuum. I went to school in Harlem, quite a long time ago, during 7 88 DARK DAYS a time of great public and private strain and misery. Yet I was somewhat luckier than the Harlem children are today. I was going to school in the Thirties, after the stock market crash. My family lived on Park Avenue, just above the uptown rail road tracks. The poverty of my childhood differed fr om pov erty today in that the TV set was not sitting in front of our faces, forcing us to make unbearable comparisons between the room we were sitting in and the rooms we were watching; neither were we endlessly being told what to wear and drink and buy. We knew that we were poor, but then, everybody around us was poor. The stock market crash had very little impact on our house. We had made no investments, and we wouldn't have known a stockbroker if one had patted us on the head. The market was part of the folly that always seemed to be overtaking white people, and it was always leading them to the same end. They wept briny tears, they put pistols to their heads or jumped out of windows. Ihat)s just like JVhite folks, was my father's con temptuous judgment, and we took our cue fr om him and felt no pity whatever. You reap JVhat you soJV, Daddy said, grimly, carrying himself and his lunch box off to the factory, while we carried our lunch boxes off to school and, soon, into the streets, where my brother and I shined shoes and sold shop ping bags. Mama went downtown or to the Bronx to clean white ladies' apartments. Yet there is a moment fr om that time that I remember today and will probably always remember-a photograph fr om the center section of the Daily NeJVs. We were starving, people all over the country were starving. Yet here were several photo graphs of farmers, somewhere in America, slaughtering hogs and pouring milk onto the ground in order to force prices up (or keep them up), in order to protect their profits. I was much too young to know what to make of this beyond the obvious. People were being forced to starve, and being driven to death, for the sake of money. One might say that my recollection of this photograph marks a crucial moment in my education; but one must also say that my education must have begun long before that moment, and dictated my reaction to the photograph.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  But he also knew a lot about the skills and compromises that they made in order to keep the marriage afloat. These observations underlie his resolution, which he called an epiphany—that if he wanted a good marriage it would take hard work. School for Spouses A DULTS RAISED IN intact families have been to “marriage school” alongside their academic learning. By the time they reach adulthood, they figure they’re as prepared as they will ever be to build their own family. They have watched their parents carefully, observing them in many moods, in different settings at different times, in sickness and in health. They have seen them use humor in tense situations to tide them over and watched them read each other’s moods and body language to distinguish a minor upset from an incoming storm. One colleague, Paul Amato from Pennsylvania State University, has proposed that the main difference between adults raised in intact families and those in divorce is that the latter lack social skills. But it’s more than social skills. Those raised in an intact family understand the marriage’s context. They know that to make a marriage work amid today’s pressures, you have to keep it front and center in your mind at all times. Nobody wanted a marriage just like their parents. There are big generational differences. All of the men and women in the comparison group wanted a freer, more equal relationship than their parents had, even if it meant more arguments. They all expected that the wives would work, which made a huge difference in their roles and especially in their parenting. But the children raised in intact marriages used their parents’ marriages as a model that they could shape to their liking. They did not doubt the very existence of a happy marriage, even if their parents failed to attain it. The lack of observations and memories of a working marriage is a serious handicap for children of divorce in learning to live closely with another person and striking the balance that both need. It’s like becoming a dancer without ever having seen a dance. Adults from intact families have two other advantages over those raised in divorced families. They had a sense of continuity with their families. They felt that they were part of an important tradition with a history and that they had a responsibility to their parents and children to maintain this continuity. This sense of being part of a family tradition gave them a perspective that helped to stabilize their relationship and influenced their desire to have children. They also had a realistic sense that marriages change over time. They did not expect their twenty-five-year-old brides to look and act the same at age thirty-five.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I had no idea what TJVo Cities was really about, any more than I knew what Uncle Tom's Cabin was really about, which was why I had read them both so obsessively: they had something to tell me. It was this par ticular child's way of circling around the question of what it meant to be a nigger. It was the reason that I was reading Dostoevsky, a writer-or, rather, for me, a messenger-whom I would have had to understand, obviously, even less: my re lentless pursuit of Crime and Punishment made my father (vo cally) and my mother (silently) consider the possibility of brain fever. I was intrigued, but not misled, by the surface of these novels-Sydney Carton's noble renunciation ofhis life on the spectacular guillotine, Tom's forbearance before Simon Le gree, the tracking down of Raskolnikov: the time of my time was to reduce all these images to the angel dancing on the edge of the junkie's needle: I did not believe in any of these people so much as I believed in their situation, which I sus pected, dreadfully, to have something to do with my own. And it had clearly escaped everyone's notice that I had al ready been bull-whipped through the Psalms of David and The Book of Job, to say nothing of the arrogant and loving Isaiah, the doomed Ezekiel, and the helplessly paranoiac Saint Paul: such a forced march, designed to prepare the mind for conciliation and safety, can also prepare it for subversion and THE DEVIL FINDS WORK danger. For, I was on Job's side, for example, though He slay me, yet will I trust Him, and I ll'ilt maintain mine own ways befo1'e Him-You will not talk to me fr om the safety of your whirlwind, never-and, yet, something in me, out of the un believable pride and sorrow and beauty of my father's face, caused me to understand-! did not understand, perhaps I still do not understand, and never will-caused me to begin to accept the f.1tality and the inexorability of that voice out of the whirlwind, for if one is not able to live with so crushing and continuing a mystery, one is not able to live. The pride and sorrow and beauty of my father's face: for that man I called my father really was my father in every sense except the biological, or literal one. He formed me, and he raised me, and he did not let me starve: and he gave me some thing, however harshly, and however little I wanted it, which prepared me for an impending horror which he could not prevent.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  455 In 1849, Dostoevsky was imprisoned and then made to serve as a common soldier, but he emerged with a renewed faith in Christianity and the value of common people. He was punished for working on behalf of political reform. While working with a group that planned to publish articles calling for political reform, he was arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to be shot by fi ring squad at age 28. Pardoned by the czar at the last minute, he was sentenced to four years of hard labor in Siberia, then fi ve years’ service as a common soldier. In spite of the hardships of prison, Dostoevsky reforged his own soul there. In prison, he endured fi lth, stench, chains, cockroaches, and the loathing of his fellow prisoners. But he emerged from prison with renewed faith in the teachings of Christ, in the souls of the oppressed, and in the creative process. After returning to St. Petersburg in 1859, he wrote extensively and absorbed the intellectual infl uences that led him to conceive the protagonist of Crime and Punishment . He helped to found a new journal, then published two notable books. Though saddled with debt and often ambushed by epileptic seizures, he built a masterpiece around the character of a humanitarian murderer: his answer to the philosophic theories of his day. Dostoevsky conceived his novel as the study of a young man who embraced dangerous new theories. In light of these theories, Dostoevsky’s novel asks, in effect, “How would a humanitarian murderer conceive his crime, commit it, then live with the consequences?” Fyodor Dostoevsky. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Again, I was listening very hard to jazz and hop ing, one day, to translate it into language, and Shakespeare's bawdiness became very important to me since bawdiness was " THIS NETTLE, DANGER .. one of the elements of jazz and revealed a tremendous, loving and realistic respect for the body, and that ineffable force which the body contains, which Americans have mostly lost, which I had experienced only among �egroes, and of which I had then been taught to be ashamed. My relationship, then, to the language of Shakespeare re vealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past. Under this light, this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way a flower opens at morning, but, more probably, the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw. The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through lo\·e-by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it-no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw; his public streets and his pri\·ate streets, which are always so mysteriously and in exorably connected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and \\ill again) the lot of an American writer-to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who ha\"e eyes to see and see not!-1 am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them. That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to deteat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that -mighty, unname able, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people-all people!-who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there. ShoJV, February 196+ Nothing Personal I USED to distract myself, some mornings before I got out of bed, by pressing the television remote control gadget fr om one channel to another.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The door of the first-floor gallery was closed, but not locked, and I slipped in. A table had been set up where work on the triptych could take place, and some temporary rearrangements had been made. The pictures themselves were still there, the two new parts hooked up in an approximate line with the "Mirror" picture. I stood and tried to focus my attention on them. It was the middle panel that we had not covered in our little seminar—taken straight from a photograph, Paul had said, but was the subject of special importance? An empty street, a bridge, a gothic oriel, a density of old roofs beyond, the tower of St John's evidently, with the black flecks of the jackdaws circling; it was the odd quarter-hour of evening when you find you can't see properly any longer, the details fog, you strain to read grey against charcoal. Or maybe it was just the dirt, which from the side you saw on the surface—it might have been swabbed with muddy water. Maybe it was a bright spring morning, waiting to dazzle, full of things to be done, unaware of the tragedy welling at the day's end. I looked at the familiar panel of Jane. Real shadow here, it was a dream of beauty, glimmering silk, folded angels, throughs of velvety dusk. Then I pictured her splayed successor, the plunge from reverence to cruelty. I assumed that, after once being robbed of what he loved, Orst had needed to chain his girl down (Marthe she was called), to insist on his power while he could, with a kind of futile force—it was like watching the anger of bereavement hugely delayed. I met the face in the dark oval of the mirror, and caught my breath as much at my own stupidity as at the halting gaze of chrysanthemum eyes. Chapter 17 A suntanned blond dawdled past, looking down at me coyly, noncommittally, seeing if the memory hook caught in the murky pond. "Hi," I said. "Oh hi!" He dropped on to the banquette beside me. I felt him briefly adjusting to the gloom that I gave off and my lowered stare across a clutter of empty glasses. "How are you?" he said brightly. "How are you, Ty? you're looking very brown." "Mm—I've been in London." "Oh . . . " (And what sort of name was Ty, anyway? It sounded like an actor in one of Matt's films. "And then at last Casey submits to Ty's throbbing fuck-pole . . . " And there it still evidently, self-importantly, was.) "How is the old dump?"